News - Freesat confirms upcoming addition of on-demand content from the BBC and ITV

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BBC iPlayer will become available to Freesat users in December, with ITV Player following early in 2010.

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Does anyone know what quality of iPlayer via Freesat is going to be compared to say, iPlayer on the Wii?

I am currently using the Wii to watch iPlayer on my TV and, though watchable, the quality isn't that great.

I'm guessing the limited processing power of Freesat tuners is likely to limit the quality though... Any thoughts?

It would be good if you could download it to the HDD that some freesat boxes have and then watch it back in better quality.

Iplayer on your wii and computer and mobile phone all rely on bandwidth of the boardband connection and processor power of the device your using.

Iplayer and on demand services for the freesat would 'I guess' use a different method of receiving its video stream. So I guess if the video coding and compression was smart then a freesat box shouldn't need much power to decode and that the quality should be alot better, if not DVD quality.

The HD streams on iPlayer (available on a PC via the website, XBMC plugins plus others) is 1280x720 at around 3.2Mbps.

Quality is pretty good - certainly miles from equalling Bluray, but equally ahead of SD freeview.

I'm guessing the limitation on the Wii is the decoding complexity of higher rate H264 streams - given Freesat TVs have hardware decode for H264 at ten times that rate, i'm guessing it won't be a problem.

Freesat TVs and boxes have a lan port - the frontend (or the software to enable it) will be sent over the air, but the streams will come over your broadband connection and be subject to the speeds you can get on a PC.